Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
companies'transportationinfrastructurewasconsistentwithcommunity-
based responses to abandonments elsewhere on the North Coast.
Local and regional government ocials were not the only ones who
initiated negotiations with the fruit companies over resources: many
former plantation workers took direct action by squatting on company
properties in an effort to create new livelihoods. In 1927, more than a hun-
dred people occupying abandoned (enguamilado) Standard Fruit farms
near La Masica petitioned Honduran President Miguel Paz Barahona for
the right towork 7-hectare plots of land ''independently.'' When Standard
Fruit objected to the squatters' presence, Jacobo P. Munguía defended
their actions by explaining that the squatters sought permission to plant
modestamountsof Lacatanbananas:''Ratherthanleavingtheselandsun-
cultivated, they want to plant them in that disease-resistant variety and
should the company find a market for the variety, they will happily sell
theirfruittothecompany.''
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HeadmittedthatthelandsbelongedtoStan-
dard Fruit, but stressed that the company would find the squatters to be
reasonable collaborators, not adversaries.Unfortunately for thewould-be
banana growers, export markets for Lacatan fruit did not materialize dur-
ing the 1920s. The onset of Panama disease exposed the limited freedom
possessed by non-company producers, large and small. Even those will-
ing to gamble on the Lacatan were ultimately forced to abandon the trade,
shut off from both transportation and marketing networks.
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That same year, members of the Unión Ferrocarrilera de Honduras
(Honduran Railroad Workers Union) and a group of campesinos began
working ''lands around an abandoned camp'' of the Standard Fruit Com-
pany situated to the west of Sonaguera.
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Labor leader Zoroastro Montes
de Oca requested that the government help to ensure that fruit compa-
nies did not seek to evict the workers from the land as apparently had
happened elsewhere in the area. He offered the activities of a railroad
worker named Luis García as an example of the squatters' industrious-
ness: on some seven hectares of land, García planted maize along with
smaller amounts of sugarcane, plantains, bananas (for animal feed), root
vegetables(malanga),andcoffee.AccordingtoMontesdeOca,Garcíahad
unknowinglyfound''thekeytocompletefreedom''thatwouldenablehim
to quit his job on the company railroad in favor of farming. He further
promised that, if supported by the government, the worker-campesinos
would soon form a ''great property or cooperative'' on the land.
In 1931, a La Ceiba-based workers' organization asked the national
governmenttograntthemthefreeuseof ''landsabandonedbythebanana
